to spare before the last train left for
London, and I drove back again in a fly from the Knowlesbury station to
Blackwater Park, with the purpose of questioning the gardener and the
person who kept the lodge. If they, too, proved unable to assist me,
my resources for the present were at an end, and I might return to town.

I dismissed the fly a mile distant from the park, and getting my
directions from the driver, proceeded by myself to the house.

As I turned into the lane from the high-road, I saw a man, with a
carpet-bag, walking before me rapidly on the way to the lodge. He was
a little man, dressed in shabby black, and wearing a remarkably large
hat. I set him down (as well as it was possible to judge) for a
lawyer's clerk, and stopped at once to widen the distance between us.
He had not heard me, and he walked on out of sight, without looking
back. When I passed through the gates myself, a little while
afterwards, he was not visible--he had evidently gone on to the house.

There were two women in the lodge. One of them was old, the other I
knew at once, by Marian's description of her, to be Margaret Porcher.

I asked first if Sir Percival was at the Park, and receiving a reply in
the negative, inquired next when he had left it. Neither of the women
could tell me more than that he had gone away in the summer. I could
extract nothing from Margaret Porcher but vacant smiles and shakings of
the head. The old woman was a little more intelligent, and I managed
to lead her into speaking of the manner of Sir Percival's departure,
and of the alarm that it caused her. She remembered her master calling
her out of bed, and remembered his frightening her by swearing--but the
date at which the occurrence happened was, as she honestly
acknowledged, "quite beyond her."

On leaving the lodge I saw the gardener at work not far off. When I
first addressed him, he looked at me rather distrustfully, but on my
using Mrs. Michelson's name, with a civil reference to himself, he
entered into conversation readily enough. There is no need to describe
what passed between us--it ended, as all my other attempts to discover
the date had ended. The gardener knew that his master had driven away,
at night, "some time in July, the last fortnight or the last ten days
in the month"--and knew no more.

While we were speaking together I saw the man in black, with the large
hat, come out from the house, and stand at some little distance